We’ve had the absolute pleasure of working with home chef Alex Mosko the past few weeks to create all of the strategy and production materials for his latest web project, “Town & Cooking.” Town & Cooking will feature an amazing digital setting for beginner and advanced home cooks alike to get comfortable with cooking by better understanding the basics such as “how to brown butter,” and “what type of eggs should I choose?” in the form of amazingly simple tip-cards attached to posts and recipes, in addition to a massive recipe database using our latest exclusive plugin for clients to take advantage of Google’s rich snippet data for recipes.

While there are a ton of awesome parts to this project–including the use of the revolutionary content e-commerce platform, Tinypass–we wanted to share with our readers what it’s like to first develop some initial direction for a logo, pick through the options, and then come out with a final winner.

Setting “the mood”

Since developing the perfect logo for a small business can be a definitely personal affair for an owner or other stakeholders, the BWD team takes the time to fully explore what the business means to them, the type of tone they’d like to set, and what tickles their visual fancy. To do this, we often set a collaborative mood board with a client, as seen above. In the case of Town & Cooking, we highlighted some of the bright and crisp kitchen inspiration that Alex had initially mentioned in our discussions that came across as friendly and unique.

After all different types of discussions with a client, our team truly start to draw out the magic of what we think they’d like to visually include in their brand. This process can take as long as a client needs, and often involves great discussions with clients, looking at lists of visual website details that they like from other businesses, working along side them in their offices, or even taking a walk with them to gather a better sense of their intended tastes.

The initial logo and design stories

The fundamentals of design are always about connecting various aesthetics through all of the senses available to us, we choose to present initial design presentations as “stories.” Quite often these stories are accompanied by abstract or detailed descriptions of the inspiration used for each story, in addition to the types of emotion the designer has intended to draw out. Here’s what we came up with for Town & Cooking after this important period of collaboration:

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